10 Facts About Twitch, The Company That Amazon Is Buying, That Will Blow Your Mind

Amazon announced on Monday that it purchased Twitch for $970 million. Twitch is a website where video-game enthusiasts can view and participate in live streams of video games in real time.

Unless you're familiar with the video-game community, chances are you have probably never heard of Twitch. However, it accounts for a surprising amount of internet traffic — nearly as much as giant web brands like Netflix and Google, among others.

1. Twitch accounts for more than 43% of all live video-streaming traffic by volume.

2. Twitch falls right behind Netflix, Apple, and Google when it comes to peak internet traffic in the U.S., according to The Wall Street Journal. It accounts for 1.8% of peak internet traffic, which is just above Hulu at 1.7%.

3. Streaming video games is more than just a hobby — it's a lucrative business for some professional players. Jeffrey Shih, a popular video game streamer, told Forbes that the best streamers can earn upwards $100,000 based on their live streams alone.

4. Twitch amassed more than eight million unique users after its first month.

5. And the numbers have kept growing since then. The site now has 55 million users.

6. Twitch amassed about 45.6 million unique visitors and more than eight billion page views for the period of time between July 26 and Aug. 22, according to Quantcast.

9. The average user spends 106 minutes per day watching content on Twitch. That's about an hour and 45 minutes each day.

10. 76% of Twitch's users are between the ages of 18 and 49. Only a third of these people go to traditional video-game websites for news, and many of them are cord cutters and don't have traditional cable TV.